Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

The banya wasn’t a true Russian bathhouse with its peeling walls and charcoal-stained stoves, but rather a tiny prefab Swedish sauna (as dull and wooden as Vladimir’s furniture), which had been attached to the panelak in a makeshift manner, like a space module to the Mir. Here, the Groundhog and Gusev were slowly cooking themselves alongside a platter of dried fish and a small barrel of Unesko.

“The King of the Americans has deigned to bathe with us,” Gusev announced upon Vladimir’s arrival, fanning himself with a large salt-encrusted perch. Without clothes, Gusev’s body matched the Groundhog’s curve for curve, a preview of what Vladimir would look like ten years hence unless he succumbed to Kostya’s exercise regimen. “And have we been sleeping ’till this late hour?” Gusev asked. “My men tell me your car and driver have been idle all day.”

“And what business is this of yours?” Vladimir said carelessly as he picked up the traditional bundle of birch twigs with which the Russian bather flogs himself, supposedly to improve circulation. He flicked the birch through the air in what was meant to be a menacing gesture, but the wet twigs only said, “Shoo,” in a sad and lethargic way.

“What business?” Gusev bellowed. “According to our money man, in the past two weeks alone you’ve spent five hundred U.S. dollars for drinks, a thousand for dinners, and two thousand for hashish. For hashish, mind you! And this when Marusya has her own little opium garden right here on the premises. Or perhaps our opium’s not good enough for you, eh, Volodechka? Some thrifty Jew we’ve found ourselves, Groundhog. He thinks he’s the party boss of Odessa.”

“Groundhog—” began Vladimir.

“Enough, the two of you!” the Groundhog shouted. “I come to the banya for relaxation, not to hear this pettiness.” He spread himself out on a bench, his stomach overhanging both sides, sweat running down the pocked immensity of his dorsal plane. “Two thousand for hashish, ten thousand for whores… Who cares? Melashvili just phoned from the Sovetskaya Vlast’, they’re leaving Hong Kong with nine hundred thousand worth of crap. Everything’s fine.”

“Yes, everything’s fine,” Gusev sneered, biting off the perch’s head and spitting it onto the steaming logs in the corner. “Melashvili, that nice Georgian black-ass has to toil the world over to keep our Girshkin happy—”

Vladimir leapt up in anger, nearly dropping the towel that covered his small manhood, a weakness he did not want exposed. “Not one more word from you!” he shouted. “In the past two weeks I’ve befriended nearly every American in Prava, I’ve started work on a new literary magazine which will take the Western element by storm, my name has appeared twice in Prava-dence, the expatriate’s journal of record, and tomorrow I will be an honored guest at an important reading of rich English-speakers. And after all the work I’ve done, most of it stupid and degrading, you dare accuse me…”

“Aha! Do you hear that, Goose?” the Groundhog said. “He’s publishing magazines, making rich friends, going to readings. Good boy! Keep at it, and you’ll make me proud. Say, Gusev, remember those readings we used to go to as kids? Those poetry contests… Write a poem on the theme ‘The Oft-Tested Manliness of the Red Tractor Brigade.’ Such fun! I fucked a girl at one of those, I surely did. She was dark like an Armenian. Oh, yes.”

“I do not question your authority,” Gusev began, “but I do—”

“Oh, shut up already, Misha,” the Groundhog said. “Save your whining for the biznesmenski lunch.” He reached over to the fish platter and shoved a small specimen into his mouth. “Vladimir, my friend, come here and strike me with the twigs. Got to keep my blood going, or I’ll melt on the spot.”

“I beg—” Vladimir started to say.

“Hey, hey, fellow!” Gusev shouted as he leapt to his feet. “What’s the meaning? Hey! Only I am permitted to whip the Groundhog. That’s practically diktat around here. Just ask anyone in the organization. Put down those twigs, I say, or it won’t be cheerful for you.”

“You’re being petty again, Mikhail Nikolaevich,” the Groundhog warned. “Why shouldn’t Vladimir give me a whipping? He’s a strong young buck. He’s worked hard. He’s earned it.”

“Just look at him!” shouted Gusev. “He’s flabby and weak-wristed. He’s half my age and already his breasts are distended like a cow’s. Oh, he’ll whip you like a little pederast, that’s for certain! And you deserve so much better, Groundhog.”

Any discomfort Vladimir may have had at the prospect of whipping his employer faded with Gusev’s words. Before he even knew it, his hand had made an angry gesture through the air and there was a clap of thunder at the Groundhog’s back. “Mwwwaaarff!” cried the Groundhog. “Uga. Hey, there. That’s the stuff!”

“Is this the whipping of a pederast?” shouted Vladimir, shockingly unconcerned over the illogic of that sentence, as he flagellated the Hog once again.

“ Bozhe moi, that’s pain, all right,” the Groundhog grunted with pleasure. “But a little higher up next time. I’ve got to sit on that thing.”

“To the devil with both of you!” Gusev whispered loudly. He stepped up to Vladimir on his way out, ostensibly to give him the look of a lifetime, but Vladimir, knowing better, busied his eyes with the red topography of the Groundhog’s back, a challenge for any budding cartographer. Still, he couldn’t avoid a glimpse of Gusev’s neck, a thick and corded piece of anatomy, despite the corpulent disorder below.

Only after Gusev had slammed the door behind him did Vladimir remember his childhood fear of saunas, the paranoid feeling that someone was going to lock the door and let him steam to death inside. He thought of himself and the Groundhog trapped together, their skin as translucent as that of a steamed dumpling, nothing inside but boiled meat: it seemed like the worst death imaginable.

“Oh, but why have you stopped,” moaned the Groundhog.

“No, I shall prevail over that fat-necked bastard,” Vladimir muttered to himself, and he set to task with such ferocity that upon his first strike a purple-black pimple exploded, and the Hog’s heavy blood made its way through the sauna’s fishy air, which was as thick and inviolable as Gusev himself.

“Yes, yes,” the Groundhog shouted. “That’s the way! How quickly you learn, Vladimir Borisovich.”

THE JOY WASa vegetarian restaurant but beneath it lay a meat market of a disco where the perennially hard-up regulars lured unsuspecting backpackers, many still sporting their Phi Zeta Mu T-shirts, into nights of forgetfulness and mornings of waking up on a futon in the nether reaches of Prava’s suburbs, trying to connect with an authority figure back in the States on an antiquated telephone that could barely reach out across the Tavlata. On Sundays they had readings.

Vladimir went down the threadbare stairs, where the small pink-and-mauve dance floor was lit up by a series of overly bright halogen lights, giving the place the look of a rather impersonal womb. Presently, this arena accommodated three rings of plastic chairs and weathered couches and recliners; randomly placed coffee tables were home to bright, shapely drinks from the bar; and the artists and spectators themselves wore their Sunday best—jackets all around and hair tied or slicked back. Earrings and piercings gleamed peacefully from within their thoroughly scrubbed fleshy enclosures, gusts of rolled American Spirit tobacco emerged from fresh-colored lips, lingered in newly trimmed goatees.